The white working class has been trending Republican for a long time, but Donald Trump seems to be doing especially well with them this year—and especially among men. Why? A bunch of reasons, but this is probably one of them:
50 thoughts on “The wages of the white working class”
Comments are closed.
Ah, yes, "economic insecurity", the go-to explanation for 2016. We heard a lot of discussion about that at the rally last night, right?
Well that's a path to success and stopping your long-term bleeding out- sneering at the prols of the wrong colour and cultural orientation.
Winning that.
But hes right, isnt he?
I appreciate the irony of you whining about sneering at others. Lol, good one. Thats your schtick, how dare someone else intrude!
Yep. To them, equality looks like discrimination.
How dare they not get paid more than other races!
The white guys can see everyone catching up, and they are livid about it. They can't support unions or anything that would limit the ability of the mega-rich to suck the workers dry, because that would help everyone equally.
Companies exploit their insecurities...caused by the companies. Go along with Republicans and get them to blame someone else. Attack unionization. Attack minimum wage laws. Those things will help "the others" so must be stopped.
Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
And it's always Democrats' fault for making the companies insecure in the first place, amirite? There was a hilarious op-ed column in my local paper this morning by some right wing think tank tool trying to argue that if we raised the corporate tax rate, it wouldn't hurt companies, but actually poor workers. Because if companies pay higher taxes, how are they going to raise wages then?
As if companies have *ever* funnelled windfall profits back to their workers. Give me a fucking break.
Actually there was. a time when at least some business leaders and Republicans actually cared about workers rather than just getting richer. George Romney is an example. Sadly his son Mitt is an example of the “greed is good” world.
That kind of ethic was incentivized by some seriously high marginal tax rates. It didn't used to make sense to pay your CEO a hundred times more than your average workers made, so why not plow profits back into the business? Now the tax code incentivizes cutting labor costs and shifting all the profits to the C-suite and shareholders.
Ask Boeing how that worked out for them.
Like... literally businesses aren't taxed on wages. They could pay more now any it would not change the profits.
+ 1
It is interesting to see, within the universe of non college educated, how much better females are doing than males.
they're working instead complaining on social media about Kamala's laugh 24/7
White males are now being asked to actually do a good job to keep the job. White male implicit bias that they just deserve the job and good wages is gone. About time. Learn something. Go out and earn that good job.
No more DEI for mediocre white guys, I guess. Sad.
Well, except for Don jr, Eric, and Ivanka. And DEIs' mother wasn't a citizen when her anchor babies were borm.
The working class white males I grew up with viewed getting educated as effete and girly
"My wages are too low, so I vote for the party that thinks my wages are too high"
How does that make sense?
Many voters are extremely stupid.
The white working class and the entire former Confederacy, switched to voting for Republicans during the 60's and 70's, as Republicans made it clear to those white people that they support racism. The Voodoo Economics that Republicans were able to pass when this process was advanced has been and still is a major factor in the decline of the middle class and the increasing inequality. Blaming the votes of the white working class on economic factors is getting it backward.
You can't measure racism directly; if you ask people in polls why they vote for Trump they will not say it's because they are racist, they will give excuses. You can get statistics on education, so in the absence of the racism variable, a superficially objective analysis may give education or economic status as the main variable determining how people vote.
The major media have nearly always tried to avoid an honest discussion of the role of racism. Calling Trump a "populist" is bad journalism - he makes some some throwaway promises but his actions have always favored the wealthy and aimed to take things away from working people. There are still endless articles doing the kind of bad science that leaves racism out of the analysis, even as the racist nature of his campaign is loudly proclaimed at the MSG rally.
As for getting support from men, Trump and Vance go directly into misogyny which appeals to immature males of all ages.
I know several republicans who would not consider themselves racist but prove they are based on their comments.
“I’m not a racist, but….”
Of course not. They all have a Black friend.
Just this morning I learned that there is nothing racist about saying Puerto Rico is "a floating island of garbage" because Puerto Rico is a territory and not a race. On top of that, since race is just a social construct and does not exist, racism itself cannot exist. It's gems like these that Elon's algorithms promote to me and countless others.
Did it say anything about how 'they come inside'?
I think more notable, politically, for men in these charts is not the relative performance of white men but the absolute decline in wages.
This is one of the most misleading graphs you've presented in quite some time. Any graph that shows a percentage change from some arbitrary point in time is immediately suspect. The test is if you start at a different time, do you get the same result? When the time period is short, that goes double.
1. Whites, as a group, out-earn blacks, so a small increase for blacks and a small decrease for whites just means blacks are slightly less behind than they were. Whites still earn more. Ditto for Hispanics.
2. You're looking at wage changes in the immediate post-pandemic period, where wages at the lower end of the scale increased significantly and more than those at the upper range. Low wages jobs are more likely to be populated by blacks and Hispanics. Ergo, these groups saw higher percentage increases. But they're still low wage jobs.
Excellent observations.
Yes these graphs should be accompanied by a couple showing the kind of ststuff that Frank M referred to in order to have real meaning. Unfortunately here at the ChartsandGraphs Blog we can't add any charts and graphs of our own. And by "of our own" I mean ones stolen from someplace else.
It’s not an arbitrary time period. Given that we are discussing the mood of the 2024 electorate.
This is a chart of the % of growth; it does not indicate where white men were, compared to the other groups, at the beginning of the interval being measured
So thank you, yes; it is indeed misleading.
+1
Kevin's point wasn't overall earning power, but rather that, since the pandemic, POC have made better wage gains on average than non-college whites. So perhaps more of those white guys feel like they're spinning their wheels, whereas an Asian or Black guy can feel like they've gotten a little bit ahead relative to where they were 4-5 years ago. Do the white guys resent that? Maybe, but I think it's also not enough to really make a huge difference, particularly since, as you point out, white people were already out-earning their black counterparts by quite a bit anyway.
MAGAs are not looking at detailed real-wage data, they are listening to Trump who tells them that the economy is catastrophic and that immigrants will take all their jobs as well as eat all their pets. For a lot of lower-income white people, seeing any non-white take anything other than a menial job is a cause of resentment, and Trump tells them that they are right about this.
Well, as he stated the text, the topic for discussion is: why does Donald Trump seem to be doing better this time around with the white working class? Thus the focus on the last few years.
as he stated "in" the text that should have been... of course
Just for reference:
“In 2021, the typical White household had 9.2 times as much wealth as the typical Black household – $250,400 vs. $27,100. This ratio stood at 13.3 in 2019, prior to the onset of the pandemic.
White households also had significantly more wealth than Hispanic households (5.1 times) and multiracial households (3.0 times) in 2021. But the median wealth of White households was about 20% less than that of Asian households.”
https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/12/04/wealth-gaps-across-racial-and-ethnic-groups/
Sometimes there are good reasons for taking ratios and starting from a particular time, but as a rule taking ratios reduces the amount of information in a graph. Is it really important that blacks have improved somewhat relative to blacks if the overall gap is still very large? You might be able to tell if the absolute numbers were shown.
Kevin uses ratios too much, and often starts at arbitrary times which leave out important information. He also does not give detailed links, so getting that information becomes a detective job.
Is this right? What do democrats stand for if they aren't trying to help these folks? Maybe democrats are not actually helping them.
"Working-class Hispanics suffered during the pandemic. Protests over police violence exposed a rift between Hispanics and progressive groups. Trumpism appealed to the demographic more broadly, it turned out, including to many who had voted Democratic in the past. By 2020, younger Cuban Americans were voting more like their grandparents. An influx of new arrivals who had seen little improvement to life there during the Obama era favored Mr. Trump."
It's funny to me that people expect the government to improve their lives. It cannot do that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/us/florida-trump-republicans-swing-state.html
I don't know, but from the looks of that chart, economically at least, Democrats did help not-white-men.
And yes, we should expect government to improve our lives, it's our government, and if we run it competently, we should all thrive.
I received an education, went to university, used infrastructure, enjoyed the benefits of home ownership, maintained steady employment, and otherwise benefitted from a stable society. These are the things that government can do. Ultimately, it's up to me to take advantage of the opportunities. Some either will not or cannot. Most do ok. But small groups of immigrants like those referenced in the quote seem to be expecting something more substantial. Is that realistic? I don't know that it is.
Question:
Your chart shows only the change since 2019. If the salary remain the same then the increase is 0%. But what is the baseline for each of the groups? What if the no-college degrees white men earned really solid wages until recently? What if the asians and latinos earned dirt low salaries, and now this difference is dissipating?
Sure people will be pissed off when they get less than they had, but were they unjustifiably getting more before?
I think you hit on why there is a right-wing trend in this country and others. As the population becomes more prosperous, economically well-off people feel that they have more to lose. They are increasingly afraid of "others" who might want to take it away from them. This goes in spades for white men with a European heritage.
Entitlement. Resentment. Increasing wealth makes people more, not less, selfish.
I thought of an analogy for this situation.
It's like a mountain. In this case, a mountain of wealth. Americans, on the whole are living higher on that mountain than ever before. Often, they arrived at these heights with the assistance of government programs. But having arrived there, they look down, and damn, it's a long way down!
Anything they think might be a threat to their privileged position on the mountain is viewed as a serious danger, given the height of their perch. To them, spending government money to assist others climb higher seems like one such danger. What if these new arrivals actually push me off the mountain? Damn, it's a long way down!
What would happen if you control for state minimum wage? Several blue states with large populations of Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans raised the minimum wage while the Red States refused.
If you assume that there is a class war between the rich and everyone else in the States, and further assume that it is not enough for the rich to get richer, but the poor must get poorer (and I believe that this is how most of the rich think), then you will see average wages going down, and if there are more white males working, then you will see their wages going down the most.
Wages for the well-educated (Asians) or the hardest working or most office-friendly (female) workers may stay the same, or go up slightly, but these workers do not make up the majority of the working class.
Additionally, there should be no billionaires.
If you look at this map you will see why. Most white people without high school diplomas live in areas where there simply aren't a lot of jobs. As rural areas economic fortunes decline so do the fortunes of people without high school diplomas who live there.
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SNqjkqbNdHw/VZ3qQYQZD9I/AAAAAAAAglk/qAJ_YfgGTKA/s1600/without-a-High-School-Diploma.jpg
The poorer a population gets the more reactionary social conservatism is involved in their politics, but it's mostly when there are much wealthier or privileged people they have to live in contrast with.
Similarly the wealthier a person gets the more reactionary social conservatism can color their politics. This is because both conditions, poverty and excess wealth, create isolation and alienation from the general trends and needs that are almost the whole interest of the majority, which, then, should they hear about it, will strike the reactionary social conservative as antagonistic and so they're offended and feel they can't voice their offense and that no one is speaking to them.
In this way their disinterest in normal life becomes aggression and they feel seen and motivated when they hear increasingly belligerent political rhetoric.
And that's really the background of fascism, alienation and billionaires.
Do you have somewhere what you say here properly written up?
This probably isnt meaningful information for any voter anywhere.
2021 stimulus checks are left out of this, 2024 income is missing and much of the 2022/2023 income drop seen in the chart is actually due to shelter/housing inflation that actually occurred 6-12+ months earlier.
These data and date errors mean that the chart isnt useful in divining the mindset of voters in the fall of 2024.
... is death. Ah, c'mon, you know Kevin was waiting for someone to say it.